(Originally published in Modern Maturity March 1999)

Back in the 1950s, two young comedy writers, Mel Brooks, now 72, and Carl Reiner, now 77, sat around their offices at NBC's Your Show of Shows and began improvising funny conversations between a cranky 2,000 Year Old Man and an even-tempered interviewer.

Brooks's Yiddish-accented character claimed he had survived the Great Flood, witnessed the Crucifixion, dated Joan of Arc, and fathered some 42,000 children, "none of whom ever visit." Reiner's interviewer was a wily listener, never quite believing all he was hearing, always prodding Brooks on to funnier recollections.

For an entire decade the two comedians performed their routine at private parties. They never thought of going commercial with it until 1960 when, at the prodding of their pal Steve Allen, they made an album and–voilà!–comedy history was born.

During the 1960s, a 2,000 Year Old Man cult grew; thousands of Americans ran around quoting every line from the record. Three more hit albums followed. Then in the early 1970s, Reiner and Brooks decided to retire the sketch and do other things.

Mel Brooks directed and acted in some of the funniest movies in history. Among them: Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and The Producers, which included a side-splitting number where blackbooted Nazi chorus-boys two-stepped Busby Berkeley-style to a ditty called "Springtime for Hitler."

Carl Reiner also directed films (among them: The Jerk, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, and The Man With Two Brains), wrote books, acted on television and in movies, and developed a reputation as one of the workingest septuagenarians in Hollywood.

In the fall of 1997, almost a quarter of a century after their last recording, Brooks and Reiner decided to raise the 2,000 Year Old Man from the dead. Rhino Records produced The 2,000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000, and HarperCollins published a companion book of the same title that Brooks explains "should only be read with a Jewish accent."

The two men (and their comic alter-egos) met with writer Claudia Dreifus in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Modern Maturity: Mel, I'm told you have some special theories on what humor does for the elderly.

Mel Brooks: I do. It keeps them rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, it's an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you don't laugh, you'll die.

Carl Reiner: What about crying? Doesn't that explode your lungs, too?

Brooks: Crying is good, but not as good. Wracking sobs do help circulation, but not like laughing. The basic thing is, you feel much happier when you're laughing than when you're crying–unless you're crying with happiness. And if you're crying with happiness, then you probably come from Ukrainian people who escaped the Cossacks. They are so happy not to have those Cossacks raping and beating them.

MM: Is this Mel Brooks speaking or the 2,000 Year Old Man?

Brooks: If I knew, I would tell you. You would be the first to know. I have this alter-ego and it's like having a convenient conveyance for ideas for which you don't have to take the rap. You put on a Jewish accent, make yourself into another guy, and then you can't hurt anybody.

Reiner: It's like having your own personal ventriloquist, but without a dummy.

Brooks: Oh, there's a dummy in there.

Reiner: Yeah, but you don't have to put your arm up a––

Brooks: I don't have to put my arm up me! Listen, who wants to take the blame for thoughts that may be incorrect? Or hurtful? But as the 2,000 Year Old Man, I can be the snappy Jew I knew all my life who lived in apartment 5-A and had a comment on everything and everybody.

MM: In your most recent book, you offered secrets to a long life. Can you reveal some for us?

Reiner: Number One: Never run for a bus.

Brooks: Number Two: Never touch fried foods. Eat plenty of garlic so the angel of death won't kiss you. Eat pounds of garlic.

Reiner: Eat lightly. Many, many berries. Very good, very anti-cancer, these berries. And one last thing: Pray . . . pray fiercely for 22 minutes that your heart should not attack you.

MM: To whom does the 2,000 Year Old Man pray?

Brooks: Well, he may not be praying to God.

MM: Who then?

Brooks: He's praying to his own being that it shouldn't become an enemy of himself.

Reiner: That's very good, Mel.

Brooks: Now here's Brooks talking: Never retire! Do what you do and keep doing it. But don't do it on Friday. Take Friday off. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday do fishing, do sexual activities, watch Fred Astaire movies. Then from Monday to Thursday do what you've been doing all your life, unless it's lifting bags of potatoes off the back of a truck. I mean, after 85 that's hard to do. My point is: Live fully and don't retreat.

MM: Have the two of you moved toward spirituality as you've gotten older?

Brooks: There's been a lot of scientific devotion to our medical selves. But we've given our spiritual selves to a bunch of crazy people–rabbis and priests and ministers–who have their own agendas. If you're a Buddhist priest, everybody is on the left foot and you're the only one on the right foot. If you're Catholic, you teach that only Catholics can get into heaven. If you're Jewish, you have a small smile on your face.

MM: Because?

Brooks: Because you know the rest are wrong and you don't want to hurt their feelings.

MM: What piece of the 2,000 Year Old Man's wisdom do you use in everyday life?

Brooks: Well, one of the things I've said as the 2,000 Year Old Man is that, "We mock the thing we are to be." We're very quick, for example, to make the Jewish accent in our parents funny. When we were kids, we were ashamed of our parents' accents. But the minute I became 60, I started talking like my mother. I can't help it.
I used to speak like Dan Rather.

Reiner: We make fun of the way old people shuffle, how they get out of a chair, how they don't understand things. We mock that, then all of a sudden we are that. Mel's point is, Don't make fun because some day it may befall you.

MM: In what ways are you becoming like the 2,000 Year Old Man?

Brooks: As you get older, your skin hurts for no good reason. Why should your skin hurt? Suddenly you have a pain in your scalp. Then part of what you have on your fork goes into your mouth and part of it falls back on the plate.

MM: It must be rough on people dining with you.

Brooks: They laugh behind their napkins. They make believe they're coughing, but they're laughing.

MM: De Gaulle said old age is a shipwreck. Do you agree?

Reiner: Old age is a what?

Brooks: That's brilliant. That's a gorgeous way of saying it.

MM: Is it?

Brooks: Sure. I mean, the thing don't float anymore!

Reiner: Mel actually has a fantastic memory, you know, one that belies his age.

Brooks: And my eyes are good, too.

Reiner: He's phenomenal with his eyes. He was born with one farsighted eye and one nearsighted eye. So as he got older, he evened out. Never needed glasses.

Brooks: I can read tiny, tiny little print on aspirin labels or see a mountain a mile away with people dancing on top of it. And then I see two of the dancers disappear and see them under something and it's bobbing up and down and . . .

MM: Maybe your vision is too good. On your newest CD, you call Carl's interview character "The Pest." Why?

Brooks: Because he's always . . . verifying. I have no patience with his verifying. His need for answers never stops. It's terrifying.

Reiner: It's my need to learn.

Brooks: But it's an insatiable need. He always wants me to prove my statements. Did I really know Joan of Arc? Where did she live? He's always backing me into a corner. He's a pain in the ass. I wasn't born to answer questions. I was born to eat a peach. I was born to swim. I was born to watch a black-and-white Fred Astaire movie. And do a little procreating, if in the mood.

But what really gets me angry about Carl–and energizes me–is I know he wants me to ring the bell.

MM: What bell?

Brooks: The comedy bell. But I don't always want to ring it. I prefer to muse, to think, to peregrinate. Instead of going for the kill.

Reiner: See, when he said "peregrinate," I'm thinking, "Is that a fruit? Is it like a pomegranate?"

MM: Carl, you've played the straight man to Mel's zany characters, but you're no slouch yourself when it comes to making people laugh. What's the secret?

Reiner: Comedians have an angularity to them. They see through a prism, but it's a prism that shows correctly. They see the absolute truth. Nobody will say the emperor has no clothes, but a comedian will say, "Hey, he's naked!" I do that all the time. I do a lot of benefits, but I never prepare for them. I figure something will occur that everybody is thinking–and I'll say it. I'll go through dinner and take notes and then comment on that. We call it a counter-puncher.

MM: Are you two really best friends?

Brooks: We are. We hang out together. Tonight, for instance, we're going to eat at Pritikin. But we can't hang out afterwards because it's very gassy food. We wait one day and then go to the movies together.

Reiner: I instantly knew Mel Brooks was the funniest man I ever met. And everyone in the office knew it, too.

Brooks: I wasn't so much funny as a fountain of energy. I had a lot of energy that may have passed for humor.

MM: I read somewhere that the 2,000 Year Old Man skit started during the McCarthy period as an office joke among the writers of Your Show of Shows.

Reiner: Yeah, I'd seen this program called We, The People,in which they re-created historical scenes. Dan Seymour was the host and one night, I swear, he interviewed a plumber who claimed he once fixed Stalin's toilet and heard him say, "I'm going to blow up the world Thursday." When I saw this, I turned to Mel and said, "Here's a man who was actually at the scene of the Crucifixion 2,000 years ago." That was the first time I asked him a question.

MM: And what was his answer?

Reiner: "Ooooh, boy!" Then he told me all about Christ and how he was a "thin boy, who always wore sandals, hung out with these 12 other guys."

For the next ten years, I kept interviewing him. But it wasn't always the 2,000 Year Old Man routine. Once we did a roundtable of 12 psychiatrists–all him. Each of his characters had different accents, different countries. Other times he'd do a Jewish pirate. He'd talk about the problems in getting good sail cloth–$12 a yard and you couldn't set sail. A pirate having trouble. There's no subject he's not going to have fun with because his frames of reference are very large and his mind works very quickly–he pounces on things like a cat seeing a mouse. His mind is also panicked because he never knows where I'm going to lead him.

MM: Did you have any idea you were founding a comedy cult?

Reiner: Oh, no. It was just something we'd do at the office or at parties. Then, about ten years into it, we were invited to a party by Joe Fields, the son of Lew Fields of the vaudeville team of Weber & Fields. We did a command performance, and that's when it happened. They were roaring. George Burns said, "If you don't put this on tape, I'm going to steal it." Eddie G. Robinson said, "I wanna play this guy on Broadway." Steve Allen said, "Why don't you guys put this on record? " We said, "No, no. It's for friends at parties. Plus it's anti-Semitic, with that Jewish accent." He said, "No it's not. Look . . . we'll get a little studio. I'll pay for it, you guys will own the tape.I just want to hear it." He said if we didn't like it he'd give us the tape and we could edit it, burn it, whatever we wanted. So that was the beginning. There were four records. And now this one.

MM: It was quite the rage.

Reiner: People used it as a litmus test. I saw the album sticking out of a rack on an airplane once. One of the stewardesses said it was hers. She said she carried it with her on every flight. I asked why. She said she was often asked to go to dinner by passengers. She didn't want to waste time with someone who might bore her, so before she'd go to dinner she would stop off at a record store and play the album for the guy who invited her. If he laughed, she'd go to dinner with him. If he said, "What is that?" she didn't.

MM: You said before that you and Mel go to the movies together.

Reiner: Only if they're not blockbusters. They should just put into the newspaper the name of the movie and how much it cost to make. If it cost $1.2 million or less, I'd be willing to go see it.

Brooks: My wife and I go to art houses. That's where the good movies are. The Full Monty, Mouth to Mouth, those are great movies. The ingenuousness and the naivetè is so rich and satisfying compared to movies like Air Force One, which are designed to keep you at the edge of your seat, to keep you tingling, to keep you excited–and have absolutely no nourishment for your soul. They give you nothing to live for.

MM: How about television?

Brooks: I watch black-and-white movies. That's Roman numeral one. Anything black and white is better than anything in color. I also watch PBS and nature programs. I will watch sitcoms, but that's my last choice. There are a few good ones that mirror a little bit of what's happening in our society–Seinfeld, Mad About You, Frasier. I appear on one of them once in a while.

MM: Yes. Carl, you got an Emmy for playing your character, Alan Brady, from The Dick Van Dyke Show on Mad About You. What did you think of Seinfield?

Reiner: Never missed it. People used to always say, "Did you see Seinfeld last night?" In that respect, Your Show of Shows was similar because people would say, "Did you see it last night?" I love to be in a show where you walk into a supermarket and people are talking about what they saw the night before.

Jerry Seinfeld was a straight man in the great straight-man tradition. They have to know where the jokes are and not step on them. Bud Abbott was brilliant, George Burns, too. Seinfeld had the Jack Benny syndrome. On his show, he was the pivotal point like Benny was. But the people who got the big laughs on The Jack Benny Program were Phil Harris and Rochester. On Seinfeld, they were all better actors than Jerry. They were probably the four most dysfunctional people in the history of television comedy.

MM: What would the 2,000 Year Old Man think of The Nanny?

Brooks: I think he would enjoy her antics.

MM: Do you find her a bit of a stereotype?

Reiner: She is a stereotype. And her mother's a stereotype. That's why people watch it. In another era, though, it would have been anti-Semitic.

MM: Maybe in this one.

Reiner: Well, maybe in this one, too. But the fact is, she's accepted by the whole country. The 2,000 Year Old Man probably thinks she's the only one on television who speaks correctly.

Brooks: Coming from Minsk and Pinsk and the Lower East Side, I think her rhythms of speech are very soothing and familiar. They may seem harsh to others, but to me they're like a lullaby.

Reiner: I don't think that show would have been good during the war, when everybody who did a Jewish accent disappeared. The reason we didn't do the 2,000 Year Old Man in public for a long time was because we were sensitive to the fact that all the great Jewish comedians stopped doing their Jewish accents when Hitler came to power because he said Jews were to be made fun of and ridiculed.

MM: Is it important to have Jews on TV?

Brooks: Jews on TV? That's funny, that's not bad. There don't necessarily have to be Jews on TV. Seinfeld's characters happened to be Jewish, but they didn't do the show because they were Jewish. It wasn't created to be "Jews on TV." I think it's evolution. It evolved because there were shows that hinted at being Jewish. The Jack Benny Program. We knew he was Jewish.

Reiner: Jack Benny, George Burns, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, nobody ever said they were Jewish, but the Jews knew they were Jewish. The rest of the country didn't. We knew Benny was Benny Kubelsky, Milton Berle was Milton Berlinger. The Jews knew. Jews were always happy to know which famous people were Jewish. There was a game we'd play: [Yiddish accent.] "Do you think he's Jewish?"

Brooks: In my comedy, I never particularly promoted, quote, Jews or Jewish comedy.

MM: Well, the 2,000 Year Old Man is hardly Irish.

Brooks: Okay, the 2,000 Year Old Man you may be right on. In fact, you may be dead right on that. But apart from that, there's nothing particularly Jewish in my comedy, except if New York is Jewish.

MM: So you're really saying Jewish themes don't run through your films?

Brooks: Not through mine. Let's go through them.

MM: Okay. The Producers.

Brooks: All right. . . . [Laughter.] In the first one there are obviously two Jews . . . in New York . . . in the theater, which isn't particularly Jewish. But nothing promotes being a Jew in it except their identities. They never mention the word "Jew." They never mention "Jewish." They never mention promulgating anything Jewish.

MM: That's splitting hairs. Your humor is very consciously ethnic, Mel.

Brooks: No, wrong. In The Twelve Chairs, no Jew. Russian Revolution. Very Russian. In Blazing Saddles, one reference to being a Jew. Indian chief. Otherwise, nobody's Jewish. Young Frankenstein, monsters, monsters, no Jews. Silent Movie, no Jews. High Anxiety, no Jews except a picture of Freud, who was Jewish, and Dr. Joyce Brothers, both of whom were probably equal in profoundly understanding the dynamics of psychoanalysis. Equally. Dr. Joyce Brothers and Freud.

Reiner: He said with a smile on his face. Otherwise it'll come out as––

Brooks: "Brooks Thinks Joyce Brothers Just As Good As Freud in Every Aspect of Psychiatry."

MM: More seriously, Mel–very seriously, in fact–the Holocaust is a predominant theme in many of your movies–from The Producers to To Be or Not to Be. Is laughter a way for you to distance yourself from the horror of it? Or just to fight back?

Brooks: Both. Absolutely. You said it well. I do it to remind the world. But it's not the Holocaust. I can't make fun of the Holocaust. It's too large, too heartbreaking. You can't really deal with it, it's too earth-shattering. But I do use Hitler and Nazis and the guys who perpetrated the outrage. I make fun of them, showing what brutes and pigs they were.

Reiner: It's more than making fun. He ridicules them. He makes fun of their sense of power with "Springtime for Hitler." I'm the same way; more of a charming coward. You don't punch people, you fight with words. When I was in the Army I was confronted by an absolutely horrible bigot. I could have gotten killed. I said something funny to defuse it and got the whole barracks to laugh.

MM: In The Producers, Zero Mostel played Max Bialystock, a wonderfully lascivious old guy who has sex with a different elderly lady every afternoon. When you created the character, were you trying to say something encouraging about senior sexuality?

Brooks: No. He was based on someone real. I once worked for a guy well into his 60s who made love to a different little old lady every afternoon on a leather couch in his office. He was a show-business manager/producer type. I can't tell you his name because there are children and grandchildren.

MM: When German audiences saw The Producers, did they take the "Springtime for Hitler" scene literally?

Brooks: They didn't take it, literally or otherwise. It never opened in Germany. Actually, the first time it was seen in Germany was very recently in a Jewish film festival. It was reported to me that during that number, the mouths that fell open in the theater looked the same as the mouths that fell open in the scene in the movie itself. They couldn't believe it.

MM: What do you make of Hogan's Heroes being one of the top television shows in Germany today?

Reiner: Isn't that amazing? Those Nazis are now cute. Klink is kind of ineffectual, a funny Nazi. But they weren't ineffectual. They were very fectual. They fectualed us out of 6 million.

MM: Back to the 2,000 Year Old Man. With the year 2000 approaching, we're wondering what he remembers of the last time the world had a millennium–the year 1000?

Brooks: Oh, he was just a kid then. He was just getting a sense of himself and what he could do with his life. But it was the Dark Ages. He had to wait two, three hundred years before the Renaissance showed him you could have fun, you could have color. Raphael painted nice, fat, beautiful ladies. Things pepped him up.

Reiner: What did he think when he saw those paintings?

Brooks: He went around covering them with sheets because he thought to show such voluptuous nakedness would encourage young people.

Reiner: Was he himself aroused?

Brooks: Oh, he was aroused. The Renaissance was the 2,000 Year Old Man's Playboy.

MM: That's good to hear because I've always fretted that the 2,000 Year Old Man was a bit prudish.

Brooks: No, he made a lot of children. About 42,000 of them. He didn't phone it in.

Reiner: Did he ever commit adultery?

Brooks: Sure. Well, it wasn't called adultery.

MM: What was it called?

Brooks: It was called fooling around. You know, meeting a lot of people late at night.

MM: You say that the 2,000 Year Old Man had 42,000 children, "none of whom ever visit." But surely he's got one kid who clings to him? One papa's boy in the brood?

Brooks: Yeah, so what? There were actually three–Herschel, Merschel, and Kerschel. I don't talk about them. They're still hanging around the cave, sucking their thumbs. Who needs them?

MM: Carl, your real-life son, Rob Reiner, has recently become an activist in an organization called I Am Your Child, which urges people to interact with their infants as much as possible. Is this a reflection on the way you and Estelle raised him?

Reiner: Everybody thinks it is. We do take credit for making him a very neurotic guy, though, because we're neurotics. Why would you be in show business if you weren't neurotic?

MM: On your newest CD, you two have a bit about Hitler and Ivan the Terrible not being hugged enough as kids. Were you teasing Rob about his cause?

Brooks: No, I was supporting his cause with humor. It's true that if Ivan the Terrible had been kissed and loved between zero and three, he probably would have become Ivan Not So Terrible.

Reiner: We also have a bit about hugging your children. If Hitler had been hugged and given an ice cream, maybe he would have played with the kid next door and not attacked Poland.

MM: A final question for Mel. In one of your movies, History of the World, Part I, you play a charactercalled Comicus, a "standup philosopher." Is that what you guys do: stand-up philosophy?

Brooks: Yeah, I think I'm a standup philosopher. I often say very important things. Like, "Never put fresh pineapple on Jell-O."

MM: Why is that important?

Brooks: Because pineapple dissolves protein. Jell-O is made of protein. Fresh pineapple or papaya will melt the protein and help digest it. That's why pineapple is good after you eat meat. Or papaya is good after you eat chicken or meat.

Reiner: Reiner agrees.

Claudia Dreifus interviewed Andrew Young for our March—April 1999 issue. A collection of her best interviews can be found in her recent paperback,Interview (Seven Stories Press, 1999).